Illustration by Jan A. Igoe
Summer is my absolute favorite time of year in the Carolinas. Sure, it’s hot enough to grill steaks on your dashboard and a killer hurricane might rumble up the coast at any moment, but the caterpillars are gone.
Having narrowly escaped many near-death encounters with creepy crawlers, I don’t leave home without my helmet, hip waders, respirator and golf umbrella until mid-July. That’s when the spring hordes of kamikaze caterpillars quit bungee jumping off the trees and getting stuck in my hair.
I’m not just profiling future moths here. Anything with more than four legs, a thorax and assorted wiggly parts sends me running. As a card-carrying insectophobe, I don’t want to admire them, collect them or eat them in lollipops.
Professional insect counters claim that 10 quintillion bugs are creeping, stinging, sucking, biting and squirming around the planet at this very moment. In case you haven’t seen 10 quintillion written out before, it has 19 zeros and six commas. That’s a lot of bugs. And fear of them is a perfectly natural instinct that has enabled the human race to survive.
Nature programmed us to recoil in terror when unidentified buzzing objects swarm our way. Of course, women recoil better than men because we’re climbers. When we see a bug, we’re all about vertical ascent.
I remember this one corporate meeting—a real fancy, “crystal goblets for the ice water” kind of meeting. But it was just your normal, insomnia-curing afternoon until a massive cockroach marked “Goodyear” emerged from a female VP’s briefcase. The highly accomplished professional woman was up on that conference table before she could get her first scream out.
Within seconds, every female at the meeting was up there with her, high-stepping like an Irish dance troupe strung out on Red Bull.
But if you’d like to see a real show, invite a bug to dinner. Halfway through an excellent salad at a nice Italian restaurant, a juicy, winged intruder—dressed in balsamic vinaigrette and a crouton—waved its antennae at me from the endive. This wasn’t just a bug; it was Mothra. And yes, I screamed. Rather loudly, according to several patrons who weren’t expecting opera with dinner.
Since then, I’ve learned there are rules of etiquette for such occasions. Turns out it’s downright rude to complain about a complimentary serving of fresh protein. Cleveland State University offers etiquette tips for grads on the Web and suggests handling encounters with bugs, hair and non-edibles this way: “Remove the objects without calling attention to them and continue eating. You may quietly point out the critter to your waiter and ask for a replacement dish. Remove any objects from your mouth and place [them] at the edge of your plate.”
This may work in Ohio, where the state insect is a wimpy little polka-dot ladybug. But let’s see them “quietly point out” a homicidal Carolina mantis mingling with their meatballs. Yeah, then we’ll talk.
Jan A. Igoe writes from Horry County, a top vacation destination for large, frightening insects.